For those of you new to this: for the last three months, I've been skating with the London Rockin' Rollers (LRR) on their Fresh Meat programme: a training course for those who want to learn roller derby. (You can read my first and second derby diary if you want; the second explains what roller derby is.)

It's been brutal. I started with good intentions: going to the gym, doing my squat training, skating outside of practice. But life got in the way and the trek to the open skate sessions in Dalston or Bermondsey from outside of London on a week night proved too long and sweaty. I'd tell myself I'd squat next week and never did, and went to the pub instead of the gym.

But! I got better. I nailed T-stops (stopping with your feet in a L- or T-shape) and learned the art of sticky skating (skating without taking your feet off the ground). I can do jumps and I can take people out on track. I started not knowing how to do any of these things, so that's something. I'm almost badass.

We have fun, sometimes we fall over each other like dominoes, but everyone is so supportive and encouraging

We've been doing our final assessments for the last two weeks, which, for some teams, can mean passing minimum requirements set by the WFDTA, but for LRR, it means trying everything to the best of your ability and being safe. If it means you fall over, that's fine, as long you as fall safely or get back up and try again. Fresh Meat can then move onto wreck league, which is a mixed ability session where you can have fun playing roller derby in a not-so competitive environment and, hopefully, keep getting better and better.

I've come to know and love training with the girls on this programme. We have fun, sometimes we fall over each other like dominoes, but everyone is so supportive and encouraging. We all smell horrific after each session but we're all improving each week and we're all in it together. After a while, the smell is something you come to accept will not leave. No matter how many times you scrub your kit.

So it makes me very sad to think that the next two weeks – where we put all we've learnt into game mode in our first scrimmage – will be the last time I train with these girls, because I am moving to Berlin.

I AM MOVING TO BERLIN.

I cannot tell you how long I have wanted to write those words. It feels strange writing it on the internet and making it permanent but that's what it is: it's real and it's happening and I'm so excited and nervous and ready.

You need to not give a shit and be okay with looking like an idiot – and only sometimes feeling like a hero

I've also signed onto the newbie programme with the team in Berlin: Bear City Roller Derby (BCRD). I've been watching their games (like this one) and speaking to some of the team already, who are all so welcoming. These girls look fierce and wild and hella fun. Their newbie programme is six months (LRR was three), so by the end of it essentially I will be slamming some serious butt.

I'll also be living 10 minutes from Tempelhofer Feld (at least for the first month) – a former airport turned public park, where they've kept some of the landing strips WHICH MEANS smooth, lush tarmac for skates. I've been following @junikorndesign and @oumi_janta on Instagram – both roller girls in Berlin who not only own the most beautiful skates but seem to dance on them rather than flail, like me.

Instagram: @oumi_janta

I started training with LRR to make friends, learn a new sport, get a butt bruise, be fitter. I've done all this and more. I've fallen in love with a sport I haven't even played yet but that is undoubtedly one of the toughest out there. You need stamina and strength and discipline. You need to not give a shit and be okay with looking like an idiot – and only sometimes feeling like a hero.

I think there's something to be said about a sport that is inclusive of everyone, no matter your size or shape. The LRR team walked (and skated) in London Pride this weekend and it's an important part of what roller derby stands for: love, acceptance, diversity. I couldn't be prouder of having trained with some of the most talented and nicest and dedicated athletes in the world.

So, a few things have happened since my last derby diary: 1) I bought new skates, and 2) we are now on week 10.

We're also touching each other loads more now. Last month we focused on weaving and assists. It was our first contact week (week 3!) and essentially sets us up for what to expect in derby.

We've started skating in a pack, too, which means skating closely together across the track and keeping an eye on what everyone else is doing. It's super fun and makes me feel like a boss because I now know how to sticky skate. (Skating without lifting your feet off the ground, basically.)

And we've started working on positional blocking: learning how to block as a wall of two to four people and the basics of trying to get through a wall as a jammer. The main lesson: stick your butts out and keep them at the same height. Don't let that jammy dodger through.

Weaving is still a struggle. It is what it sounds: skating in and out and around obstacles. It's a lot of lunging to the side and opening your legs a bit more (or what my coach Despiser Minelli calls a Magic Mike: "Just imagine you have a massive schlong") without toppling over. It's very achievable and all about balance and weight distribution, and if you're in derby stance (low to the ground), it's easier.

But derby stance is hell on earth. I've never heard people shout GET LOW more in my life. I now hear BEND YOUR KNEES and GET LOW in my dreams. It genuinely helps with every move that we're learning but it means squatting constantly. And as we all know, squatting is the devil's work.

Anyway, let me tell you the cool things we've learnt in the last 10 weeks.

In week 5 we practised transitions: 180-turns. Then we did derby stops: 180-turns, backwards skating and coming to a halt on toe stops. I nailed my transitions the first few times and then I started overthinking it and now I can't stop thinking about how much I hate them, so I can no longer do them without falling over.

And this is where thinking is the enemy. Tactical thinking is, of course, vital, but if I'm thinking about exactly where to place my feet and exactly how I need to move to the left to do this and but oh god I might fall, that's where it all goes wrong.

So I try and sing when I transition now. If I'm singing I'm not thinking about where my feet are going. The other day I started singing 'He Lives In You' from the The Lion King and it worked for a bit, then I started thinking again. I'm learning to stop thinking so much.

We've also done whips and hockey stops. Whips! The thing everyone in roller derby wants to do! It's a lot less Hollywood in real life, and we don't really use our legs. We did arm whips, which looks like a catapult: sending your teammate flying to get ahead. It's still really cool and if I ever used it in a game situation, I would probably retire after.

Yesterday we learnt jumps and that was awesome, but a lot of work. Again, I keep thinking about it, and when I skated up to the jump I just freaked out and ended up leaping forward onto my knees. Which is fine, because we learn how to fall onto our knees (rockstar slide being my favourite), but not ideal.

I have some big news for my next diary (where I hopefully won't leave a 7-week gap in between) or possibly the one after that. I'm dying to say it now, but I won't in case I jinx everything.

But suffice to say: yay.

Injury update:Bruises: is it possible to bruise through a knee pad? I think I've done that. If it's not derby I have some suspicious looking knee bruisesScratches (?): 1 (getting up close and personal with someone's Velcro during a wall)Blisters: too manyBiggest pain: my lower back, holy hell

The first rule of roller derby is: roller derby does not keep you fit, you keep fit for roller derby.

Before last month, the last time I put on rollerskates was at a pub crawl around Bognor Regis. My friends and I dressed up as a roller derby team because we'd seen Whip It and thought, man, those girls are cool.

I'd gone to roller discos as a kid, weaving around school halls to S Club 7 and Steps trying to impress literally anyone that was watching, mainly my mum. At one point, I got really good on rollerblades, but as they say in derby: fuck in-line skates.

All I knew about roller derby I'd learned from Whip It: that it was scary, that it looked hella fun, that you could wear cute, kick-ass outfits and make-up like war paint, that you got to pick your own badass name and no one, NO ONE, would mess with a roller derby girl. That maybe there'd be food fights and that you needed to be strong, but not built like an athlete.

I loved everything about roller derby but I just didn't know it existed, or was as big, outside of the movies and America and the 70s. I am not sporty. I hated sport at school. The only exercise I liked was yoga, where I could lie on the floor and was encouraged to take a nap at the end. I am very competitive and I don't like losing, so sport can bring out the worst in me. I once got angry at a boyfriend because he was better than at me at bowls. BOWLS. The softest, loveliest sport of them all.

But one day last year I saw an advert for a London Rockin Rollers game and I went and I fell absolutely head over heels, tattoo your initials on me, let's run away together in love. I saw Jack Attack blitz between every single skater on track and I joined everyone as we high fived the teams afterwards. These girls were my idols. I wanted to be like them; strong and sassy and idgaf and powerful and sexy as hell.

So I signed up for LRR's three-month Fresh Meat course, and it's tough. Right now, it's about learning the basics. How not to use the wall to stop and waking up muscles that you've never used before (my inner thighs, ohmygod). It's learning how to lemon and bend your knees, lead with your tits, for a long time, constantly, while you're skating. It's T-stops and sticky skating and push starts. It's pain.

But it won't always be like this, one girl tells me as she watches me almost fall to the floor because my back hurts so much, and I'm counting on that. Like the This Girl Can ad, you don't need to look like Sporty Spice – you use your shape and size to your advantage. Small and fast? You can be a jammer. Big and heavy? Be a blocker. Never in my life have I been this motivated for a sport. I've never gone to the gym twice, three times a week, every week, and wanted to stay there to build muscle. Never have I wanted muscle. Never have I wanted to be as strong as I want to be, as fast, as agile. I see these girls and I think: I want to be you.

So that's what I'm going to try and do. I'm learning new skills and teaching myself endurance and power. I'm bringing out the punk ass me. I don't like losing. So this time I won't.

"The night that I fell in love with a roller derby queenaround and round, around and round,the meanest hunk of woman that anybody ever seen"

1. I was back travelling by myself. My new friends and I had gone our separate ways – some back to Tokyo, some to Hiroshima. I’d rearranged my trip so that I would travel through Osaka on the way back to Tokyo, because people had raved about an okonomiyaki place and I was now an okonomiyaki queen. But now was a time for me again. It was a time for Buddhist temples, mountains, trails, cycling, vegetarian food, reading. A dream, right? Almost.

2. I’d broken my back. I mean, I hadn’t, not literally, but something was seriously wrong. I could barely sit or lie down, and when I did, it took me five minutes to get back up. Walking was a disaster. Getting on the wrong train coming out of Nara and having to go back and wait for another one while a storm brewed above me and movement = pain proved too much. I cried on the train platform, thinking: what the hell am I doing. I still don’t quite know what happened to my back/shoulders/neck, but I think it was a mixture of thinking I’d be absolutely fine sleeping on very thin futons for two weeks and hiking with bad posture, not enough water. It would get worse as the day went on, for about five days, and every day was worse than the last. But as soon as I landed back in the UK, it was fine. This to my annoyance: I wanted my mum to see how much pain I was in, as I’d texted her on numerous occasions to be like ‘I’m going to the hospital, cannot take this’. I did go to the hospital, and I cycled my way there like a dingbat. Let me explain.

3. I arrived in Mount Koya by train, cable car, then bus. The bus timetables in the little mountain town of Kōyasan are incredibly regular and incredibly efficient; it’s become a little touristy, but it does mean that it’s easier to get around in a place that would otherwise probably not cater to foreigners. See: lack of language skills. (Related: I got around Japan saying ‘yes’ and ‘thank you very much’ to almost everything, apart from when I had useful new Japanese-speaking friends. I got by!) I was staying in a temple run by Shingon Buddhist monks, who got up every day at 5am to pray and begin their work. We were expected to join them at 6am, and breakfast at 7am. Breakfast was shojin-ryori, vegetarian Buddhist cuisine: no garlic, onions, leek, carrots, potatoes. Lots of pickled things, lots of tofu, miso soup. I hate tofu. I wanted to like it and thought it would be like the olive/red wine/coffee thing – the more you have it, the more you like – but by god, no. My temple was also gorgeous. A lush green courtyard and, in the rain, the smell of pine. It almost felt like I was on a movie set – it seemed so mad that I was in actual Japan, in the actual mountains, staying in an actual temple. I still don’t believe it happened. We were next door to Okunoin – famous for its pilgrimage route, where Kobo Daishi, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, is believed to rest in eternal meditation as he awaits the Buddha of the Future. It was one of the most sacred places in Japan. I took a tour here late at night and felt the weight of my sins – quite literally, as I tried to pick up a rock that's believed to weigh as heavy as your sins, and I could barely even push it.

4. I hired a bike on my first of three days. For some reason I thought cycling would be less painful than walking. Here’s where it gets good: Japan have electric bikes, where you barely press on a pedal and you speed off. This is joyous for hilly use – I cycled around that little mountain town six or eight times that day, taking the inclines like a boss. Apart from when I went too far and headed down, down, down, thinking all the time, this can’t be right, and then thinking, this isn’t right, and having to climb off the dazzling electric speed bike and walk all the way back up (WITH A BAD BACK). This is where it got bad – but not the worst, not yet. I cycled back, despite the fact that my neck had frozen in place and death was calling my name. I got sashimi and a beer and almost cried out in agony when someone tried to talk to me and I had to turn my head. I walked back to my temple and asked a monk, pathetically, where the nearest hospital was. He directed me, not as concerned as I’d have liked him to be, and so off I went. On my bike, back/neck broken, half-crying and half-soaked (it had started raining – thanks, pathetic fallacy). Kōyasan’s hospital is small but fine. I pointed to all the places that hurt and filled in a form in English and sat in a very deserted waiting room. They had to find an English doctor, and the woman that eventually saw me tried very hard to get me to explain what exactly hurt and how. I had to lie down and they had to help me. They pressed my back and I cried again because holy hell, and also I realised I was in a hospital in the mountains on my own. They helped me back up, and she prescribed a powdery medicine and a patch to stick on my back. It didn’t work for the first two days – but the sticky thing was a mild relief. I cycled back, went straight to my room and used the walls to help me to the floor, literally rolling to the centre of the room where my mattress was. I stayed here until it got dark, watched some weird Japanese reality show, and let the rain send me to sleep.

5. On my last day in Kōyasan, I got up for 6am, watched the prayers, ate something gingery for breakfast, then slipped out of my lovely temple onto the bus, cable car, and train to Osaka. This was the hardest day of all; I was close to ending my trip, and my back was still playing up. Dragging my suitcase from different forms of transport to the next was truly a monumental effort, but seeing a new city was my motivation. The thing is, I didn’t explore Osaka as much as I should. I stayed in an awesome hostel (Guesthouse U-En) where I had one of the best curries of my life and got talking to a New Zealander who had recently married a Tokyoite and had a baby. They’d moved to Osaka together and started a new life. It sounded dreamy. My curry was dreamy. I felt bad for wanting to go to bed and never move again, but I was only here for one night. I had to make the most of it. But it just got worse. I had to ask the staff where the nearest doctor was. It was late in the day, so most places were closed. I think I might have begged the receptionist, because he told me he'd keep calling and in the meantime, made a pillow palace in my capsule so I wouldn't have to move much at all. The Japanese, man. I'm telling you. We didn't get through to the doctor in the end, but later that evening I knew I had to leave this bed. I couldn't spend my one night in Osaka crippled. So I got up, and I walked.

Best curry of my life in Guesthouse U-En, Osaka

7. My last night in Japan was in Tokyo. I met up with my friends from Kyoto and we went to the Robot Restaurant. The Robot Restaurant! The one you see pictures of with the caption ‘In Japan they have a robot restaurant with robot cabaret and it’s mental’. It’s exactly that, but also wildly imaginative. My back was still in disarray, but the pain was easing. I was drinking a lot of the mysterious powdery medicine and sticking things all over my back. It was also impossible not to look around, and for that matter, move my neck, in the Robot Restaurant. It has about six floors, with the ‘show room’ in the basement. You start in the lounge, watch someone dressed up as a spaceman robot (?) play some really epic guitar, then move to the basement and eat popcorn and drink beer. Then basically I can’t tell you exactly what happens next except you’re not allowed to get up once the show starts because the robots may run you over.

Robot playing guitar in the Robot Restaurant, Tokyo

Me, still paralysed

8. That last evening in Osaka, I wandered the bright lights of Dotonbori, scouting for an okonomiyaki place. Osaka is a tinier Tokyo. Those same tall buildings and long streets and small alleys, but more navigable. Dotonbori is its beating heart; its colourful centre. It is very easy to fall in love with bright lights. It is very easy to dream about Japan when you're back home, and the food feels stodgier, more fatty, heavier. And not everyone wants to thank you. And the only lights are street lights or the same old cars you see pass your house every day. It's less noisy and crowded. But it's not as fun. I eventually found an okonomiyaki bar, where they didn't speak any English. I paired my pork-shrimp-chicken okonomiyaki with plum wine on ice, and sat in silence at the bar, watching the chefs as they fried one after another.

This blog was re-published here on Binge, a cracking new food and drink website

1. Un jus de pêcheSince I can remember and until I was about 15, my dad used to take me on holiday, usually once a year every year, and usually to France. Sometimes we'd stay in hotels that demanded a dress code for dinner, sometimes a B&B run by an old couple. Sometimes we'd stay by the sea and, one time, a restaurant in the middle of nowhere-Normandy, where you had to call ahead to reserve a table. Sometimes we had balconies, and they'd always be my favourite. I'd listen to my Walkman and eat peaches, usually when my dad was asleep. He always said they were the best in France, so we'd buy them in markets during the day and bring them back to our room and after a day or two they'd make everything smell like potpourri. When we'd go out to eat, I'd order unjus de pêche mainly because I loved being able to say it. Back home, there'd always be a weird, short silence when I ordered peach juice. No one drank peach juice back home, so peaches became a holiday thing, a French thing. Something to eat on a balcony when it was warm.

2. Miss Georgia PeachOne time, on a Greyhound bus ride back from Chicago to New York, I met a guy who’d hitch-hiked his way halfway across Canada and back down through Illinois, to Chicago, to this bus. He told me about a peach festival in New England, where they celebrate peaches during the summer and everybody bakes peach pies and drinks peach wine. Kids play on a massive peach bouncy castle. For the life of me, I cannot remember the name of this peach festival or where it was, and turns out there are loads of peach festivals in America. This is how I came across the Georgia Peach Festival: a week-long party with its own peach parade and Miss Georgia Peach ceremony. It’s also home to the biggest peach cobbler in the world (11 by 5 feet and about eight inches deep). Do you know how much peach cobbler that is? It’s stirred using literal boat handles, and put together using school bus floor panels. You can bring your own bucket and fill up on peach cobbler and then go eat the peach cobbler before having a go on the F-15 flight simulator on the front lawn of the Peach County Courthouse. (I didn’t even make that last part up.) So even though I’ve forgotten the name of the peach festival in New England, I am so glad the world has more than one peach festival.

3. Sweet peaches, salty peachesLast summer, I peached out on my meal at Roth Bar & Grill – a cosy, arty bar and gallery in Somerset. For starters: buffalo mozzarella, peach, basil and mint. To drink: a nectarine cooler – fresh nectarine, basil, lemon and sparkling water (if you’re going to lecture me on the differences between peach and nectarine, I will ignore you). Dessert was baked peach, raspberry, mascarpone and amaretti biscuits. Sweet peaches, salty peaches. We also had an affogato, because we don’t know when to quit. While we were walking around the art gallery afterwards, faster than everybody else because none of it made much sense to us, my dad turned to me and said, "Modern art is always interesting though, even if you don't like it – which I never do." I went home that night and decided peaches would be summer forever. Oven-baked peaches with a pinch of sea salt. BBQ-grilled peaches with a drizzle of honey and basil leaves. Peaches, balsamic vinegar and fat chunks of mozzarella. Spiced peach streusel muffins. Peach pancakes and raspberries. Peach pie with brown-butter custard. And more, and more, and more.

4. When in New OrleansWhen in New Orleans, drink sazeracs. When in New Orleans, visit the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, which is fully amazing, and home to the oldest bar in the city. I bought a New Orleans tea towel here and a couple of Short Stacked cookbooks – tiny recipes dedicated to a specific ingredient and written by a different author/chef each time. I bought a peaches one and a plum one. Beth Lipton (the irony is not lost on me) writes about the ‘Golden retriever-esque likeability’ of peaches and shares recipes for peachy Bloody Marys, peach BBQ sauce, peach ceviche and chicken-drumsticks-with-peaches. Her ode to peaches is almost poetic. I'm not much of a cook, but there's something wonderfully simple and attainable about a cookbook dedicated entirely to one ingredient, with bright pink pages in a thin, handmade chapbook. I think, I can do this. I think, let me at it. I think, un jus de pêche.

5. PeachesIt's just a bar, nothing more. A bar where my best friend and I dance to college rock, where we flirt with Americans, where a man I loved took photos of me over an exotic cocktail, where I'd watch my cousins go when I was underage, where I took a man home because I thought I needed to. It's the kind of bar I expect big things to happen in, and the thing is, it's just a bar with a fruity name. A bar I take all the people I love and where we always have a good time. A bar that doesn't need to mean anything more than that; a bar I can take men to and men from. A bar that's not to blame for feeling bad at the end of the night. A bar that doesn't owe me anything; just a regular joint with a cheap DJ, fast shots and long nights. Nothing more, nothing less. And still. I could have carried on dancing. I could have stopped drinking. I could have said no and meant it. It could still just be Peaches. So. I will take new friends here and it will be a good night. We will dance to old pop and drink tall cocktails and feel like we are on an island. Like we are the only ones. I will order a drink at the bar and make myself feel good. I will look good. And it will be Peaches again.

Read parts one and two here, about Tokyo, typhoons, good sushi and fake food

1. You are called brave for travelling 6,000 miles on your own. Brave for deciding to do it as a woman. You are brave for not knowing if you'll make any friends out there, for staying in hostel dormitories and capsules and Airbnbs, for dining out on your own. Brave for doing it at 25, brave for doing it without a boyfriend. Brave for travelling abroad when you don't speak the language. Brave for being blonde. Brave for doing it with a full-time job. Brave for doing what you want, brave for actually going through with it. Later, as you sing along to old Japanese folk songs with locals, you wonder how bravery can feel like the easiest thing in the world.

2. Your Airbnb host in Kyoto used to be a chef in Tokyo, so the first thing you talk about is food. Sushi, tempura, yakitori. You want to find out everything he knows. He invites you to his cooking class, where you learn how to make spinach goma-ae, okonomiyaki and teriyaki chicken. His English is jumpy and carefully pronounced and incredibly good. His wife takes photos while you chop, marinate and fry. He shows you how to cut raw chicken and you realise you’ve been doing it wrong your whole life; you practise following the curve and line of the pink flesh, letting it direct you rather than the other way around. He tells you okonomiyaki gets easier to pronounce after a few tries: okonomi meaning to one’s liking; yaki meaning to fry. You make a base of battered cabbage, eggs and grated mountain yam – then toast to your first 'Japanese pancake' with cold beer chased down with saki. It takes you hours to finish in between drinking and talking and testing out new languages on your tongue. Oconomy, you say, oconemy, ocomoyaki.

Three delicious, cheesy, bacony okonomiyakis

3. Kyoto is the first place on your tour in Japan where you have a conversation with someone. You become your best self; everything is exciting and spontaneous. After your first okonomiyaki, you head to a Hawaiian bar with a guy who is also staying at your Airbnb – it is the only place in this little precinct in Kyoto that is open after 11pm, and you are the only ones in the bar, maybe in the world, apart from a Japanese couple next to you. Both of you order long, blue drinks; Elvis croons darkly in the background. There’s a home video of the bar owners in Hawaii on a loop, and every now and then one of them points to the TV and says ‘Hawaii!’ or kawaii – sometimes you’re not sure. When you leave, they wave you goodbye from their doorway and you walk through the quiet, unlit streets of outer Kyoto at night, your tongue stained blue, feeling as if you could take on the world.

4. The streets are wider in Kyoto than in Tokyo, and the river runs straight down the middle like a spine, branching out into different neighbourhoods and making it seem bigger than it is. You’re staying near the Arashiyama district – known for its bamboo grove, lush garden temples and the Arashiyama mountains (‘storm mountains’). You meet two more travellers here, and together, the four of you explore Arashiyama on foot, bikes and from the top of the mountains. It could almost be mistaken for a village of its own – tiny, homely cafés and coffee shops, souvenir boutiques and no grey city smells or scrapers. It's steeped in tradition, made palatable for tourists. It’s here you have your most traditional Japanese lunch – the one where you can’t quite work out what you’re eating, but you know some of it must be tofu, rice with little (alive?) fish flakes. You taste ginger and soy and something earthy. Orange juice comes with tube-like cinnamon cookies on the side. You’re beginning to get the hang of green tea, and the warm, milky drink with your main course is altogether astounding. You take a picture of everyone smiling but it comes out too dark. This is always the way when you try too hard to remember; technology doesn’t quite get it. Perhaps neither do you.

I can't tell you what these little guys are, but underneath is pillowy white rice like your mama cannot make

5. There are more of you by day three, and day four, the day you leave Kyoto, seems so far away, something you try not to think too much about. You explore Fushimi Inari-taisha – a shrine that sits at the base of a mountain, 233 metres above sea level. It’s the climb that your back and neck will pay the price for in days to come, but for now, it’s all you can do not to pass out under the heat and strain. The vending machines all the way up are a godsend; Aquarius, a grapefruit-y energy drink, is the only thing you can taste for hours after. The five of you decide to go off track at the top, deciding while you are here, you may as well find a good view of the city. You wind through the woods and down the other side, through more bamboo and strong, sweet-smelling citrus flowers. You stand near old, deserted temples, nervous about your footing on its wooden floorboards, and rest by a tiny waterfall, candles lit in the shrine next to it, no one else around. You sit together, catching your breath and resting your feet, wondering what this place is or was. Afterwards, when you leave the mountain, you’ll seek out cold Kirin and okonomiyaki – already staple comfort food – and spend the night singing Karaoke with locals and drinking whiskey and coke. For now, you watch the candles burning, talk about never going home, fanning yourself against the thick sun.

6. Everything after Kyoto feels like the hangover of your trip. Nara, with its beautiful parks and outrageously social deer and glorious temples, feels more like the day after the big night. Going back to travelling on your own feels almost cruel. You wonder if you're cut out for this; writing is the last thing you want to do and you're too worn out to read. You back begins to ache in new places. You've already cut your trip to Nara short by staying an extra day in Kyoto, so you muster up the little enthusiasm you have to explore your new neighbourhood on bike. Your Nara hosts are infinitely kind and wonderful; showing you around their guesthouse, once home to one of the most famous calligraphers in Japan, and explaining how the shower works, where things are on the map, how to use the kitchen. Your stay here feels like a betrayal of their hospitality; despite arriving late and staying for only one night, they welcome you like an old friend. The morning you leave, waiting for your train, your host asks if you want to see the old calligrapher's room. You slip off your shoes, follow your host's steps as he shows you photographs, points out the cherished garden in the back, tells you about the guesthouse's marked place in Nara's history. Later, when you get on the wrong train and the clouds above threaten another typhoon, you feel the loneliness of travelling for the first time in Japan. You think of your Nara hosts and hope that, next time, you'll stay longer.

You can read part one here, except it has nothing to do with Japan and more about Hong Kong, hurricanes, and calling a place home

1. The typhoon didn't come to Tokyo in the end, but it did wreck havoc in northern Japan. Nine people were buried inside an elderly care home, thousands more stranded. Around 17 people were killed. A weekly occurrence in Japan at this time of year: not knowing if next week's wind and rain could destroy your entire life. When I arrived at my first hostel in Tokyo, jetlagged from a monster two-day trip and essentially awake purely on adrenalin, I was told to expect the worst. Lionrock was due to be biggest typhoon in 30 years. It was going to hit during the night, but by morning had been moved to that afternoon, and at that point I was advised to just keep an eye on the clouds. So I did. I walked around feeling very small under that big dark sky, amazed at how people seemed to be carrying on with their lives as normal, as if the worst typhoon in 30 years wasn't about to tear through the streets. The clouds turned white and grey but never rumbled, and by evening the sky was smooth again. Lionrock changed lanes; Tokyo was safe for one more week.

2. When I was about 4 or 5, we spent a few weeks in California with my dad on business. My grandma came with us. My grandma, who fled her home with her five sisters and mother to a better, safer life in East Germany during the war. My grandma, who was hidden from soldiers when she was 16, fearful they'd take one look at her long hair and that would be it, who cooked and cleaned and looked after her five younger sisters after their mother died. Fast forward 60 years, on a ride through one of Universal Studios' most rickety and horrifying attractions (across a bridge that 'broke' halfway, so you dangled above robot crocodiles in the river below) and while everyone was screaming and covering their eyes, my grandma sat perched up near the sides, looking over the expanse of the crocodile-infested river as if admiring a particularly charming view. I remember peeking out from behind my dad's arm and watching my grandma rock back and forth as the train clattered back onto the bridge and we rode away from the fake fall of death. My grandma will not take shit from many people, including Nazis, robot crocs or Universal Studios. Here's where I come in.

2.5. My mum wanted to visit a Japanese restaurant while we were in San Diego. She loved Japanese food, especially sushi. There were four of us: my grandma, me, my dad and mum. I remember taking one look at the food and thinking it was the worst thing I'd ever seen, and I wanted to leave. I wanted to leave so badly, I was prepared to do anything. So I whined and I cried, and my dad felt sorry for me, his little girl, bored with fancy restaurants and funny looking food. I put my head down on his lap and watched my parents’ legs, listening to them argue about whether or not to go home. They'd only just ordered and my mum and grandma were trying to convince my dad that I was acting up and I wasn't tired at all. They were absolutely right – which was the first mistake my dad made: not listening to two mothers. In the end, we left early, my dad carrying me over his shoulders all the way home, everyone's stomachs grumbling. I smiled sweetly at my mum and grandma from behind us; they knew I’d won. I knew I’d won. It was the last time I ever acted up in front of my grandma. And the first and last time I rejected Japanese food.

Lunch at Grandma's Georges, Shibuya, 1 Chome-20-11 Jinnan

3. Asakusa is not what I imagined Tokyo to look like; there are no towering skyscrapers or complicated crossings or neon signs. It almost has a rural feel to it – crumbling buildings and tiny streets and girls in kimonos walking in pairs, always in pairs. This was where I was staying, at the Khaosan Tokyo Origami, near the Sensoji temple. To get there, I had to either walk underneath the Kaminarimon (‘thunder gate’) and up Nakamise – a wonderfully crowded shopping street that leads all the way up to the temple, packed with hot, sugary smells and souvenirs and lots and lots of tourists. Or I could snake through the streets branching away from the market and temple, which basically means more shopping and little mercy for my purse. In what should have been an ordinary 15 minute walk from subway to hostel usually took me a good hour, because there was always something to look at. It was easy to get distracted, to try macha ice cream or dangos (a sweet, soft thing on a stick) or browse through hundreds of tiny keyrings and charms and fans and yukatas. At night, with the market boarded up and closed, the lanterns lit, the walk to the temple felt private – a quiet retreat from the louder, brighter parts of the city. This was my favourite time. A few locals stood outside the temple to pray, and the girls in kimonos took the last of the sunlight to pose in front of the temple and take selfies. I will forever be fascinated with the Japanese love of photographs and taking pictures, like they’re trying to hold on to every beautiful thing. I very much don't blame them for trying.

Sensoji temple, at night, blowing you away

Sensoji temple in the day, and a pretty kimono

4. Plastic food is an art form in Japan. Outside almost every restaurant and café, you will see plastic food – a perfect replica of what to expect inside. And it works. It’s tantalising; so shiny it’s hard to look away. Sometimes I wonder what comes first – the fake dish, the real dish, or the recipe? Back in the 1920s, fake food was used to entice people into restaurants and make it easy for them to order a dish without looking at a menu, which wasn’t very common in Japan. Now, it still makes it easy for people to order a dish without looking at a menu, but it's become an art, and part of the dining out experience. Ironically, some restaurants sometimes spend more money making the fake food than they do selling the real food. On the other hand, they last forever, and they’re pretty to look at, and they make you hungry – so potentially very, very worth it in the long run. I relied on the fake dishes in Tokyo, even when I was given an English menu – mainly because I still wanted to guess what it was I was eating, and in part to see if it really did look like the fake food. (It always looked like the fake food.)

Fake fried shrimp, fake deliciousness

5. Shibuya crossing is way less stressful than I imagined it would be. Tokyo, and Japan, are way less exhausting and confusing than I thought they would be. If you don’t understand, there’ll almost certainly be an English translation. If there isn’t, there will be someone to ask, someone who will gladly walk you to exactly where you need to be – even if you didn’t ask them to, even if you don’t know how to thank them enough and get a bit teary. If you still don’t understand, learn some languages, read more. I didn't get lost, not once, not in the way I thought I would: completely stranded in a city full of symbols and characters that I couldn’t work out. In some places, tourists and foreigners get free WiFi, and there is always a map. There is fake food. The big Starbucks overlooking the cross-section has a good view of the crossing, but the fight for a seat is more chaotic than the actual crossing. If you find yourself in the centre of Tokyo, my #toptips are: keep walking, look up, look down, and learn how to say arigatou gozaimasu.

Shibuya, bright and tall

6. Tsukiji Market was my last stop in Tokyo. I’d heard about the tuna auction at 5am, a place where ‘men argue loudly about fish’, and it sounded perfect. But I’m not a 5am-kinda-girl, so I arrived for the public opening at 9am instead. A few of the sushi bars (and there are a lot of sushi bars in the outer market – most of them with only enough space for about 6-12 people) notoriously have queues 2-3 hours long every day. I am not all about that life, despite the wonderous order of a Japanese queue, so I found another bar instead – a little hole in the wall with one sushi chef. I ordered the most delicious looking thing, and watched him prepare, slice and handle the freshest fish I’ve ever seen. I started talking to a man from Singapore, who helped me work out when and how to drink my miso soup. I learnt that green tea really goes with sushi. I learnt that you can make a sushi chef smile if you look curious and hungry enough and take enough pictures of his fish. I learnt sushi for breakfast works, but probably only in Tsukiji. The market is set to move later this year, taking with it hundreds of years of history and leaving behind a very wobbly infrastructure. It’s so packed with tourists that over the years it's become a little shakey, so parts of the market are off limits to visitors before 9am, and most are encouraged to stay in the outer market. I learnt that the Japanese probably have one of the most sociable ways of eating: at a bar, in front of the chef, next to strangers. I learnt to love chop sticks. I learnt to never, ever reject Japanese food again.

1. Most of the time, when people ask me where I'm from, I really don't know what to say. There's the obvious answer: where I live and sleep, and where I've lived for the last decade, bar a few years, but that answer is lazy. I don't feel much attachment to the small town I've lived in for the last decade, although maybe I should; maybe something's wrong with me, that I can't hang up my home sweet home sign and make do, give the answer with the least explanation required. But where's the fun in that? Why can't I not fully know where I'm from? Do I have to be from somewhere? I like that I can't really give you a straight answer. That where I'm from isn't just one place, it's lot of places, and I'm still working on it.

2. I'm sitting in Hong Kong airport, kinda amazed that the last time I was in this city was about 25 years ago, when I was born. I can't see the city from here because the clouds are heavy and low today, and I can't leave the airport because I don't have a visa and they won't let me out anyway, because I have a connecting flight, but somehow it seems fitting that the next time I would be in Hong Kong would be in a state of movement: from one place to the other. And it's stupid because I'm sitting in a goddamned airport and could just as well be anywhere in the world, but there must be something about returning to where you are born that makes you feel slushy inside. I wouldn't know because I've never done it before, but I do feel a bit romantic about being here, even if it's from inside a massive building. Security look at my passport and see Hong Kong and look up at me and nod, and aside from the fact that I don't look like a conventional Hong-Kongian, they don't know I haven't been here before – properly. For all they know, I could be coming home, and I guess in some way, I sort of am.

3. I watched It's Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong on my flight over here – a cute, simple romance between two strangers and expats living in Hong Kong. It's also what this post is named after, because I love that line. I'm 7 hours ahead of England, 16 in America, so I really am in the future. My eyes feel it and my body feels it, fersure, and I can't tell whether I need to sleep or drink coffee first. I will do both soon, but want to talk about the movie first. The premise is simple, dangerously so, leaving far too much room to feel contrived: two expats meet in Soho and take a walk through the city and talk. That is literally it, as well as a few nice story surprises, and a great cameo from Hong Kong indie-folk band Noughts and Exes (who I've been listening to while writing this). But it really worked. It's a love letter to a great city, written with a tight script and enough awkwardness to make it feel like there's something that these two have together, even though they don't quite know what it is. Travelling, exploring, adventure – it's like falling in love, no?

4. The thing is, it's really cool to say that I was born in Hong Kong, but it's kind of lost its meaning. It's a cool Carlotta fact but it sucks not having any memories or real attachments to Hong Kong, other than what my parents tell me. I didn't grow up here and I don't speak the language. I can't tell you anything about the city or the culture. I once bought a world map and pinned all the places I had been, but I didn't pin Hong Kong or Australia or Thailand or Beijing or Singapore and countless other places, because I was too young to remember any of them. But I was there, travelling to and from different hotels my dad worked in. One time we were caught in a hurricane in Fiji. My mum loves telling the story and uses it whenever I'm feeling down or pokey about something. She'll say, 'If you can survive a hurricane, you can survive anything' – and it's wonderful to think that I fought my way through this horrendous natural disaster, but in reality we were all evacuated to a hotel basement with plenty of supplies and I probably slept my way through it, as any bored little girl who didn't know or couldn't understand what was going on would do. So to be here, in actual Hong Kong, even in an airport that could be anywhere, feels meaningful in some way. And when I get back home, I'm gonna stick in a pin in Hong Kong and say I was there, in the hope that next time I'll stay a little longer.

5. 220,000,000 – the number of people living in countries that aren't their own. Already, that represents the fifth largest nation on earth; a nation created out of movement, privilege or force, a nation of travellers and expats and refugees and third-culture kids and runaways and outsiders and people whose home isn't where they were born or brought up or chose to be or expected. Movement, like Pico Iyer says, is a fantastic privilege, but it only has meaning if you have a home to go back to. In his TED talk, 'Where is home?', Pico says how lucky we are today that some of us are able to choose where we call home, that our sense of community isn't just in one place, like in our grandparents' age. Things have changed. We are lucky to be able to have breakfast in one country and cross an entire continent in time for dinner. That is a privileged thing, and we need to keep hold of that. Not everyone moves to a different country of their own accord, or because they've always wanted to. But I think and hope they will be able to 'fashion their own sense of self' regardless, that they won’t feel as if they are torn between two cultures, that both countries will somehow feel like home, that maybe one day they’ll find a third home and a fourth and maybe a fifth, that their community will be wherever they feel most at home on that given day, where their loved ones are.

6. My next stop is Tokyo, where I'll spend a couple of weeks touring Japan and writing about touring Japan. They might be a bit rough because I want to write and post and not worry too much about what I'm actually writing. We'll see how it goes. Right now, I'm going to explore the airport and dunk my face in coffee and try to get some sleep. I kinda want to find the highest point in the airport where I can look out at the peak, see if I can spot Matilda Hospital. My mum will never forgive me if I don't come back with a picture.

It feels like I'll always belong to Hong Kong in one way or another, because this city was the first thing I saw, and surely that's gotta have stayed with me somehow.